Robinhood Accelerates Global Expansion with Chain Mainnet, Stock Tokens, AI Trading, and New DeFi Suite

Robinhood has unveiled considered one of its most bold product expansions but, launching its personal blockchain community, introducing tokenized shares to greater than 120 international locations, increasing decentralized finance (DeFi) choices, and bringing AI-powered buying and selling to cryptocurrencies. Introduced throughout the firm’s Robinhood Presents: The World is Flat keynote in London, the brand new merchandise spotlight Robinhood’s technique to bridge conventional finance with blockchain expertise whereas accelerating its worldwide enlargement.

The bulletins come as competitors intensifies amongst brokerages and crypto exchanges racing to capitalize on tokenized real-world belongings (RWAs), decentralized finance, and synthetic intelligence. By combining these applied sciences right into a single ecosystem, Robinhood goals to make blockchain-based investing extra accessible to mainstream customers.

Robinhood Chain Enters Public Mainnet

Main the bulletins is the general public launch of Robinhood Chain, the corporate’s new Layer-2 blockchain constructed on the Arbitrum expertise stack. Designed for tokenized real-world belongings and decentralized functions, the community provides built-in help for lending, borrowing, and different DeFi providers whereas offering builders with a permissionless platform to construct on.

Robinhood has partnered with a number of established blockchain firms to help the community. Uniswap will deploy a devoted automated market maker (AMM) to supply liquidity, whereas Pleiades is launching its personal AMM targeted on skilled buying and selling. Infrastructure suppliers Alchemy, BitGo, and Chainlink will provide developer instruments, custody, and oracle providers.

Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s Senior Vice President and Normal Supervisor of Crypto and Worldwide, stated the corporate needs to take away the technical boundaries which have historically restricted DeFi adoption.

“We’re bringing the very best of conventional finance and DeFi collectively, and in doing so, increasing monetary possession to each nook of the globe.”

Tokenized Shares Broaden Globally

Robinhood additionally launched Stock Tokens, permitting eligible customers in additional than 120 international locations to commerce tokenized equities by way of the Robinhood Pockets. Availability varies relying on native laws.

Not like typical brokerage accounts, Inventory Tokens can commerce 24/7 on Robinhood Chain. Customers may deploy them into lending swimming pools or use them as collateral throughout DeFi functions, giving tokenized equities extra utility past value publicity.

Buying and selling will probably be obtainable by way of decentralized exchanges together with Uniswap, Rialto, Lighter, Arcus, and 1inch.

Robinhood famous that the belongings are tokenized debt securities that monitor the worth of underlying shares fairly than offering direct possession or shareholder rights. Its present tokenized fairness product will proceed underneath the identify Traditional Inventory Tokens within the Robinhood Europe app.

The launch displays the rising curiosity throughout monetary markets in bringing conventional belongings onto blockchain infrastructure.

Robinhood’s New Inventory Tokens

Robinhood Earn Brings DeFi Lending to the Important App

The corporate can be rolling out Robinhood Earn, its first decentralized lending product built-in immediately into the Robinhood app for eligible U.S. clients.

Robinhood Earn permits customers to lend dollar-backed USDG stablecoins by way of a self-custody pockets whereas incomes an estimated annual yield of round 7%.

The lending infrastructure is powered by the Morpho protocol, with help from companions together with Steakhouse, Ethena, Spark, and Maple. Robinhood additionally stated insurance coverage masking sure cyber and sensible contract dangers has been organized by way of Lloyd’s of London and RELM.

The product represents one other step towards simplifying decentralized finance for retail traders by embedding blockchain providers into a well-known investing platform.

Robinhood Earn

AI Buying and selling and New Derivatives

Robinhood can be increasing its AI capabilities with Agentic Accounts for cryptocurrency buying and selling. Following the launch of AI-powered buying and selling for shares and choices earlier this yr, eligible U.S. clients will quickly have the ability to join AI fashions to Robinhood’s Buying and selling MCP infrastructure, permitting automated buying and selling methods to execute inside user-defined capital and threat limits.

The corporate emphasised that customers stay in management by deciding how a lot capital an AI agent can deploy and by setting security guardrails earlier than trades are executed.

Robinhood additionally introduced broader entry to perpetual futures. Eligible customers can now commerce crypto perpetuals by way of decentralized change Lighter inside Robinhood Pockets, whereas European clients will achieve entry to perpetual contracts tied to commodities, ETFs, and overseas change markets, together with gold, silver, Brent crude, WTI crude, and EUR/USD, with leverage of as much as 10x. U.S. crypto merchants will even profit from new maker order varieties providing charges as little as 0% for qualifying buying and selling volumes.

Perpetual Futures Growth within the EU

Worldwide Progress Accelerates

Alongside the brand new merchandise, Robinhood introduced a number of milestones in its international enlargement. The corporate now serves practically 28 million clients throughout 38 international locations and plans to launch cryptocurrency buying and selling in the UK quickly.

Robinhood additionally formally entered Canada following its acquisition of WonderFi, providing zero buying and selling commissions for Canadian crypto clients by way of September 30. In Asia, Robinhood’s Singapore enterprise has secured a Capital Markets Providers licence from the Financial Authority of Singapore, bringing it nearer to providing brokerage providers in one of many area’s main monetary facilities.

A Broader Push Into Blockchain Finance

Robinhood’s newest bulletins characterize its strongest dedication but to integrating blockchain into mainstream investing. Moderately than treating crypto as a separate asset class, the corporate is constructing an ecosystem that mixes tokenized shares, decentralized lending, AI-powered buying and selling, and derivatives by itself blockchain infrastructure.

As tokenization and DeFi proceed to achieve momentum amongst each institutional and retail traders, Robinhood is positioning itself as a platform that connects conventional monetary markets with the following era of on-chain providers whereas increasing its footprint throughout international markets.